Cross-lingual text retrieval (CLTR) is a technique for locating relevant documents in different languages. The authors have developed <it>fuzzy conceptual indexing</it> (FCI) to extend CLTR to include documents that share concepts but don't contain exact translations of query terms. In FCI, documents and queries are represented as a function of language-independent concepts, thus enabling direct mapping between them across multiple languages. Experimental results suggest that concept-based CLTR outperforms translation-based CLTR in identifying conceptually relevant documents.